Book Reviews & Giveaway: Hell’s Corner

There is something about Oliver Stone (a.k.a. John Carr) that remains inimitable. As intimidating as Jason Bourne, Oliver Stone proves more than just an action character in a book. His complexity, stealth, intelligence and most of all, personal integrity in the world of intelligence ops that recognizes nothing as integral or moral – or off limits – sets him above the mere aphorism of “character.” Oliver Stone lives through Baldacci’s searing novels, but he lives beyond the page to his readers and fans. And this is what makes a good character great. Stone is not simply an Uber Man. He and the Camel Club bring dignity to the realm of high level government intelligence that brutalizes its own, including Stone, a genuine hero in his country’s interests.

I have yet to read a Baldacci that I can’t put down and ponder over when I have reached the last page. Perhaps, most importantly, Oliver Stone pops from the page as one of the greatest of fiction novel’s true men. He stands alone on his own terms, and goes beyond survival to dignity.

Stone, called into the White House to speak to the President, is not surprised. Once the U.S.’s most successful assassin, Delta Six, Stone has committed a faux pas – he has intentionally killed two high level American men, both evil and corrupt, to revenge the death of his wife and child. He must atone for these acts of treason, in the eyes of his President, and the President needs to send Stone a lesson in the form of an assignment so lethal that he will probably not return. Penance, the President calls it, but in actuality, it is the sacrifice of Stone’s life. Stone himself accepts the assignment as he realizes that he will never be free of his country’s animosity if he does not comply.

The assignment, however, turns on its head as Stone stops to rest in his favorite haunt, Lafayette Park, also called Hell’s Corner, across from the White House. It is a place he often goes for peaceful reflection. Tonight is different. The Prime Minister of England’s motorcade is directly in front of Hell’s Corner, on Pennsylvania Avenue, headed for a meeting with the President. Four strangers hover in the usually empty park, a woman, and three men. Stone recognizes one of them as an undercover U.S. agent. Suddenly, rounds of gunfire splash around the West corner of the park around Stone and the agent, and a lone male jogger walks into a hole around a newly planted tree – and gets blown sky high. Stone falls into the undercover cop in the blast, and when he recovers, the park statue is decimated, along with the jogger. The other three people are long gone – who are they?

When an old friend of Oliver’s, James McElroy, ex-head of M16 special forces for the Prime Minister, summons him through an English M16 operative named Mary Chapman, Oliver learns that he has been re-assigned. McElroy, a legend in British intelligence, now works to protect the PM. And he remembers when Oliver, as John Carr, saved his life.

Stone’s new mission, with Mary Chapman as his partner, is to find the bombers. And to absolve himself from any revenge from the President of the United States.

Clandestine, auspicious, another Baldacci time bomb with an intelligent and surreal detonation device, Hell’s Corner rounds up another Baldacci best seller. So intriguingly written that my hand almost shook turning each page! Olive Stone and David Baldacci have done it again – an absolute sacrosanct thrill ride across the deadly tundra of American and British intelligence and governments. Baldacci, with as much integrity as Oliver Stone himself, has outdone himself once again with an absolutely death-vise thriller.